Bo Naylor Is Milwaukee-Bound as Brewers, Guardians Exchange Depth Pieces

If this trade deadline turns out to be a dud, you’re going to see a lot of people blaming the 12-team playoff format, which has flattened the competitive landscape around the edges of the playoff field. As of Saturday morning, 11 of the 15 American League teams have at least a 25% chance of making the playoffs. In the National League, there’s a bit more stratification, but nine of 15 teams have at least a 19% chance of making the playoffs. The few teams that are well and truly out of the race are so positioned for a reason — i.e. they don’t have many good players to sell in the first place.

You could use that as an excuse to sit out the deadline, or you could do what the Brewers and Guardians did: find another contender to trade with. The Great Lakes region’s two great perennial discount contenders hooked up on a four-player trade that sent catcher Bo Naylor and reliever Codi Heuer to Milwaukee in exchange for outfielder Blake Perkins and reliever Craig Yoho.

Credit to baseball ops bigwigs Chris Antonetti and Matt Arnold for finding a trade partner in this treacherous market, but this kind of swap does have its drawbacks. Namely: None of the four big leaguers on the move in this deal has been any good in 2026.

Heuer has thrown 9 2/3 innings this year, allowing five earned runs along with 12 hits and five walks. Somehow, that’s good enough to put him 0.1 wins above replacement level. Naylor, Perkins, and Yoho are all underwater in terms of WAR.

The relievers in this deal are both low arm-slot right-handers. Heuer you might remember as a rookie phenom for the playoff-bound White Sox in 2020. In 2021, he got traded across the city with Nick Madrigal for Craig Kimbrel. Heuer tore his UCL in the spring of 2022, and threw only 12 2/3 innings over the three seasons that followed. He made it back to the majors last year, but he’s now on his fourth organization in 13 months, with only 11 big league appearances to show for it.

Heuer’s been around so long he was Dallas Keuchel’s teammate in a season where Keuchel was a top-five Cy Young vote-getter. Despite that, he only just turned 30 last month and is still optionable. The Brewers would need to work some magic to turn Heuer back into a useable playoff arm; as he is, he’s a Quad-A depth piece.

Yoho is like Heuer, except he’s four years younger, has a better changeup, and throws a sinker instead of a slider. That changeup is something special: Opponents are hitting just .103 off it this season, and it tunnels well with his two fastballs. All three pitches have above-average arm-side movement, thanks to Yoho’s sidearm release angle, and the changeup moves like someone opened a trapdoor underneath it.

The results haven’t quite matched Yoho’s potential; in 23 major league appearances, totaling 28 2/3 innings, he has struck out 25 batters while walking 17 and hitting three others. Nevertheless, the Guardians’ pitching staff is heavy on low-three-quarters righties; Colin Holderman and Franco Aleman are as close as Cleveland gets to a righty with that arm angle. If nothing else, it’s a new look. Yoho is more likely than Heuer to make an impact down the stretch; if not, he’s young, cheap, and optionable in 2027. A reliever with those qualities doesn’t have to be especially good to find major league work.

The two position players are the most interesting part of this trade.

Over most of the past decade, the Brewers have put together great pitching staffs on the cheap. They’ve put the ball in play and they defend well, but their offense goes dark every October because if Christian Yelich and William Contreras don’t come through, they have to wait through seven outs for those two to come up again.

Perkins played quite a bit during that time; from 2023 to 2025, he appeared in 242 regular season games and batted 773 times. Over the course of those three seasons, he hit .232/.314/.339, with a 10.3% walk rate but a strikeout rate (26.0%) that simply isn’t acceptable for an outfielder who hits for so little power.

Perkins can switch hit, which is to say he has a career wRC+ of 95 against lefties and a career wRC+ of 72 against righties. He’s fast, and he can play center field if need be. He’s not a good player, but when you’re running a bottom-half payroll, “not good” is not the worst thing a player can be.

Fortunately for the Brewers, if not for Perkins, they’ve developed a full set of young outfielders with some juice: Jackson Chourio, Garrett Mitchell, Luis Lara, and the currently-injured Sal Frelick. All of a sudden, they don’t have to settle for “not good” anymore, which made Perkins expendable. Especially because he’ll be arbitration-eligible after this season, and therefore a likely non-tender candidate.

The Guardians, however, have not been so successful in their outfielder-growing pursuits:

Sweet Jesus, that’s bleak. Perkins is only hitting .157/.250/.258 this season, but if Angel Martínez and his .257 OBP were my third-best outfielder heading into the playoffs, I’d be willing to try just about anything.

And on the surface, the Guardians gave up a lot to try just about anything. Naylor is by far the most famous person in this deal, thanks to his exploits alongside older brother Josh both in Cleveland and for the Canadian national team. But just 19 months after trading Josh away, the Guardians are now out of the Naylor business altogether.

A quick peek at the stats makes it easy to see why. The younger Naylor was tremendous as a rookie in 2023; he posted a 123 wRC+ and 2.1 WAR in just 67 games. Since then, though, it’s been rough.

Since the start of the 2024 season, Naylor has hit .192/.266/.351 (for a wRC+ of 74), with a 27.1% strikeout rate. To be clear: The Guardians don’t mind a catcher who carries a pool noodle to the plate instead of a bat. In the 2020s, Guardians catchers are hitting .193/.269/.326, for a worst-in-the-league 68 wRC+.

But if you’re going to strap on the tools of ignorance and go 0-for-4 every night, the Guardians do expect elite defense. The team might be dead last in offensive value from catchers this decade, but it’s seventh in defensive value.

Naylor has graded out as fine over his career (he had one great framing season and a couple average ones), but he’s no Patrick Bailey or Austin Hedges, and so he’s now surplus to requirements. And like Perkins, Naylor is set to hit arbitration this coming winter.

The Brewers, in case you were curious, have gotten 28.9 WAR from their catchers in the 2020s, which is the top mark in baseball. They’re first in wOBA and fourth in defensive value, and their incumbent starter, Contreras, is a 28-year-old three-time All-Star. When Contreras is either off or starting at DH, the Brewers have Gary Sánchez, who’s hitting .214/.368/.422 in 193 plate appearances. That’s a heck of a backup.

So what do the Brewers want with Naylor? Here, I have an obvious short-term answer and a long-term theory.

Right now, the Brewers are starting a right-handed bat-first catcher, with a right-handed bat-first backup. Naylor is a left-handed hitter, and while he’s not as good a defender as Hedges or Bailey, he’s basically Johnny Bench compared to Sánchez. It’s a cleaner fit for a partnership with Contreras. From there, the Brewers could offload Sánchez to any of the numerous contenders who could use a catcher with a clue at the plate. Or they could carry all three catchers after rosters expand.

In the longer term, it’s worth noting that Contreras is making $9.4 million this year with a $14.5 million club option for 2027. Exercising that club option will be the easiest decision Arnold makes in his entire career, but after that Contreras is a free agent, and likely in line for the kind of contract Milwaukee doesn’t like to hand out.

Naylor has been pretty hapless at the plate the past three seasons, but he still has above-average bat speed and a pretty good feel for the strike zone. And as much as I’ll continue to rag on the Brewers’ offense until it shows up in the playoffs, Milwaukee has had some success turning post-hype ex-prospects (Andrew Vaughn, Jake Bauers, and Brice Turang, who had a 77 wRC+ over his first two seasons in the majors before he found his power stroke) into good hitters. Bauers, who didn’t hit a lick his first five years in the big leagues, is now toting around a 140 wRC+. Chapeau, Milwaukee. You’ve done the impossible.

You’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this: If the Brewers can work the same magic on Naylor, it greases the skids to trade Contreras this offseason. The Brewers will have picked up their next starting catcher, who’s under team control through 2030, for a low-leverage reliever and an outfielder they were probably going to non-tender anyway. That’d be quite a steal, if it works out.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, this is an exchange of depth relievers and back-of-the-40-man position players, none of whom are likely to make a massive impact on this season’s pennant race. The Guardians got the better end of the swap of pitchers, but if the Brewers can return Naylor to anything like his previous standard of competence, they won’t miss Yoho even a little.